


Monster

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: A Soft Hoodwink of Shadows [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Angst, Falling In Love, POV Will Graham, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-01-08 13:49:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 17,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12255651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Something a little creepy...





	1. Chapter one.

**Author's Note:**

> All done! As some of you know, I hit a dark patch at the end of last year and stopped doing all the things I loved-basically everything Hannibal-related! It's been a challenge but this was an important step towards recovering...I can't thank you enough for reading and hope you enjoy the journey! Working on more in the series! Thank you Hannibal Fandom! x

There is no doubt that my mind has taken some of the summer away from me, like you would take away a knife from a child.  
Not everything, of course. There are still enough blunted bones of memory remaining, jutting out of the low fog, snarling and clattering, to make me wonder why I fight the erasure, why I want to be whole again.  
To make me wonder why I am deliberately seeking out nightmares. 

To make me wonder what kind of man that makes me. 

 

Winston hated the rain, so I should never have moved him to Ffynnon Ddu. A land of waterfalls. Crushing. Drumming. Water forging like an iron plough through the green and the earth and the silver-black rock. Water like a rain of iron spikes, wearing away what was once solid. 

But Eleri, Abigail’s mother, was Welsh, and after she went, and I got myself invalided out of law enforcement, it seemed right to go take a look at the roiling, fertile soil that had birthed such a wondrous, maddening creature. 

So the three of us, myself and my daughter and my dog, rented a low, dank cottage in the village between two mountains. And as soon as I got there it was exactly like discovering Eleri all over again; an encounter with something secretive and folded in upon itself, dark and misted and impenetrable, so that each unexpected spell of light was so longed-for, so cherished, that you would repay it and repay it with an insane, feverish gratitude. 

Abigail settled in immediately, without any dramatic reaction to the upheaval, loss of prior classmates or home, to my relief and inward unease. The avoidance I was greeted with was no more than I had often suffered, even in the most urbane of cities. The odd guy out. The gentle, trembling freak. That I was foreign, an American, was irrelevant, I’ll give the villagers that; my neighbour was eastern European, and there were other outsiders, tourists sometimes, visiting artists and retirees to the area, so that this in itself did not seem to disturb a people so wholly convinced of their own, organic place in the world. Such a landscape, full of timeless terror and untouched glory, will always be forced to welcome gawkers, as it will always drive away some of its more discontented sons and daughters. 

Eleri had an aunt still living there, with a crammed, cramped shop of mouldering, splintered antiques, but the sense of ‘normal’ family I had hoped to encourage in Abigail did not take root. 

“Daddy, I don’t wanna go there again. She says I steal.”  
Winston begged for buttered fruit-loaf half-heartedly from the unlit hearth. The little queen did not often share, even with her most loyal of subjects.  
“What?”  
“Great Aunt Delyn. The Crone.”  
“Not kind, Gally.”  
“She says I’m just like Mom was. Wilful and a liar.”

Mechanically, I turned the crime scene photographs over as Gally perched on the table, licking her fingers with a sharp tongue. The occasional Scotland Yard consultation was meant to add to the pension without further crippling my sanity, but by God I had sweated as the bloated brown envelope had been passed to me by a curiously disinterested postmistress. 

“Maybe you…honey, did you move something at her place? I know you like to…look at stuff. I know you’re very…tactile, honey. You know. With shiny stuff.”  
“Ugh, no. Not in that place. All that dusty old garbage. I’d get leprosy. Or the bu-bonn-ic plague. I thought I could read some books next door with Hans when you’re working. You could call around and ask him.”

Winson barked out into the wet dusk. The door was propped open with our boots. It was hot, and the planked wood was so swollen it hardly fit the frame anyhow. I supposed at the time he was scenting foxes. 

I scratched at my head. Time with other people was meant to be good for both of us.  
“Who? Hans who? Is it…is there something…specific about her you don’t like?"  
Gally lifted one eyebrow, a raven’s wing taking incredulous flight.  
“Uh?” She was tired, and generally faked it better when we in company. This cool contempt for the unintelligent, the foolish, the ordinary. Like or dislike did not come into it.

I wondered if I could afford to pay a babysitter. Whether there were youth groups or a club. In fact, I wasn’t sure how many pre-teens I had actually seen around the place, let alone whether Gally would condescend to interact with them. Even the adults of the place were invisible, given to drifting in and out of the periphery of the few shops, the tiny village hall, the streaming streets. For all I knew the entire neighbourhood could be part of one of my fugues, a nowhere I had conjured up out of Eleri’s half-remembered, poetic, savage bedtime storytelling. 

“Ok.” I kissed the soft tangles of my daughter’s hair. “We’ll figure something out. Can you take Winston out before you go to bed? If you don’t and he climbs in with you he’ll probably pee in his sleep.”  
“Fine.” Gally rolled her eyes. She hugged me lightly, as if humouring some needy old relative, and skipped down the steps and into the steaming delta that comprised our backyard.


	2. Chapter two

Abigail eventually progressed the plan on her own. At lunchtime a few days later, there was a sharp knock on the front door. 

“Hello. I…Hi. You must be..?”

The guy living in the larger, drier property next to our little shack was carrying a kind of insulated holdall. He held it out encouragingly.

“Hans. Lovely to make your acquaintance. I have already met your charming little girl. Forgive me for not introducing myself earlier, but I thought you might need some time to acclimatise. Perhaps to grow gills.”  
His eyes had those lines at the corners that crinkle when someone is honestly amused, and I realised that he was smiling at my puzzled reaction rather than his own witticism.  
“Um. Yes?”  
“A charming little girl indeed, who waxed lyrical about her Daddy’s longing for a traditional Welsh cawl. To a neighbour who has suitable ingredients for that native dish growing in his garden.” 

I cursed. There was no use shouting to berate Gally. Not least because she had gone off on some esoteric search for pagan artefacts an hour before. Winston had reluctantly followed, unable to resist Gally’s commands, and I thought I saw a pale little girl slinking along behind both of them. One of the local kids, I hoped. Socialisation being a learned trait and all.

“I’m sorry.” I shrugged, helplessly. “Too many Disney films, I guess? Clever kid with lonely single Dad. Beautiful neighbour. Romantic meddling. Happy ever after.”  
I stopped, flushing. This was why I usually contented myself with being uncommunicative and surly. Not that he wasn’t beautiful. He looked like Lucifer himself.   
Hans started to withdraw with unruffled grace. “Gally doesn’t strike me as a fan of that particular brand of nonsense, but she did mention how consuming your occupation was. So, perhaps another time?”   
I shook my head and gestured for him to come in. In truth, I was more curious than I was embarrassed, a legacy from my former life; to be allowed use of our pet-name indicated an unheard-of level of respect for so short an acquaintance.   
“Sorry. Shit. I’m being rude. And awkward. And I’m Will. Did she mention any or all of that too?”

The soup was exceptional, earthy and succulent with fat and bone. The company was…stimulating.   
“Home-made bread, scented with wild garlic.” Hans had looked at it, sniffed at it and finally accepted it with full, dark lips. “I am impressed.”   
The implication was clear that such a miracle did not often happen.  
“Uh,” I looked down quickly, away from his mouth. “I’m not trying to domesticate Gally, God knows her Mom tried to get her into frills and an apron without success. Just, channel her intelligence, I guess. I worry what would happen if she gets…bored.”   
Like Eleri, I thought, and got up clumsily to fetch a pie and some of the local, unctuous cream. “I’m, well, boring.”  
He gently took the glass jug from me. “I cannot believe that. Gally told me all about the action of yeast. And that you’re growing mould on a slice of the bread, observing decay. From the dialogues we have had over the gate, she has quite interesting playtimes, I would say.”

The tiny kitchen grew darker and warmer as the rain sealed us in. I felt drugged and disconnected. I looked out of the thick-paned window and gnawed at my lip. Undoubtedly, Gally had an umbrella. Winston would be resigned to a soaking, as usual. As I sat back down, my knees brushed those other ones, bent elegantly beneath the rickety table. 

“You…you’re an artist?” Hans’ strong, tanned forearm was streaked with vermillion. There was charcoal in the grooves on one knuckle.   
“Purely for pleasure,” he said. “I retired early, am alone in the world and therefore free to travel to the most atmospheric localities I can find. In these days of development and homogeny, I confess to a fascination with the unique.”  
“Yeah. It’s…otherworldly here alright. I get lost going to the store. All those streams, all around us. All the time. It’s a wonder the village isn’t constantly flooded out.” 

I bit down an urge to tell him that the nightmares were returning. I hadn’t had them this badly for years. Hideous imaginings. Rotten, faceless shapes. Choking pain.

“So,” I swallowed. Those hands. Oh, those hands. “Ex-surgeon?”  
Observations earned smiles, I was learning, and I preened inside as he laughed. “How astute you are. I did some preliminary training in that field. But I am, by trade, a psychiatrist. I lecture a little now, when the mood takes me. On influences of the occult on certain crimes. My specialty, for my sins. Unnatural crimes, you might say.” He touched the back of my wrist, gently, reassuringly, with one fingertip. “My apologies, Will. It is too sour a topic for such a lovely dessert.” 

I must have told myself a hundred times during that meal not to fall. Not to mistake his generosity for flirtation. That of course I was attracted to him, but that I should manage such a thing properly, calmly. Not like a hormonal adolescent. I tore my eyes away from the way he put the blackish berries into his mouth. Licked up stray trickles of juice. Shut down the treacherous sparks of empathy that told me such a man could eat perfectly neatly if he wanted to.

“Um. Well. Don’t know if Gally said, but my whole career’s not been exactly pretty. Damaging, in fact,” I added, quietly. “I…I…feel damaged.”   
Hans leaned forward. “Broken things can be the most compelling, I believe. There are always stories in scars.”  
Something about the shadows across the fine angles of his face stirred a memory. A blurry picture on the back of a book jacket, on a shelf back at Quantico. Well-thumbed, well-written. New tacks to take. Refreshing lines of thought on that age-old question; why do people kill?  
I frowned. “It’s odd. When I was on the…ah…profiling side of things in federal employment, there was a standard text by a Han…”

The front door banged. There were running steps along the corridor in the direction of the outside bathroom. 

“Ah. I see I am caught.” Hans put out those long, refined fingers, formally. Invitingly. His smile was sweet and rueful.  
“Dr. Hannibal Lecter, at your service. Forgive the subterfuge.” He looked very seriously at me. His eyes were very dark. “It is such a mouthful for most people to manage.” 

Gally, finished with her hurried ablutions, danced into the room. She smirked to see us holding hands across the remains of lunch.   
“Hi Daddy. Hi Hans. Any pie left?”  
I gave her my seat and switched on the yellowish bulb overhead, even though it was only just afternoon. “Sure, honey. You go dry off and I’ll cut some.”  
Hannibal cleared a place. Gally returned with a towel.   
“So,” he obligingly handed her a spoon. “Have you had a productive morning, Miss Gally? Has your archaeological instinct proved correct? Did you find the Black Well of legend?”  
I nearly dropped the bowl as I heard Abigail chuckle back playfully.  
“It’s not a fairytale, Hans. My Mom used to tell me all about it when I was a baby.” She tipped some muddy detritus out of her bag onto the table. Bits of excavated rubbish. “We found these sacred offerings along the way but the brambles were too big for us to go any farther. I guess in olden times they were trying to make the spirit of the water happy.”  
“We?” I couldn’t recall many of Eleri’s stories. I was usually in work. Always in work. Saving lives while my own crumbled to pieces.   
“Teresa and me. Her Daddy’s working on repairing the pylons over the ridge. They’re Polish. He’s an engineer they sent here. She’s really shy.”   
Gally began a long discourse on the transport of power and power-lines which I mostly let Hannibal field. It felt right. Breaking bread. Sitting back and listening to lively, back-and-forth talk between my daughter and someone she liked. Hannibal’s replies, tailored for a child’s understanding of mythology and religion and science and geology were anything but patronizing. His voice was precise yet melodic. I stirred through Gally’s dug-up finds, muddying my fingers, day-dreaming my way from Hannibal’s casual conversation to how it might feel to have his voice speaking to only me. In the darkness, whispering deep and hot, running all over my skin. Pouring instructions and praise and entreaties into my craving ears. 

“Votive gifts were usually something dear to those that offered them. Sacrifices, if you will. Something given for something bestowed.” Hannibal sorted out a bottle-cap. “I am afraid the water-witch would not think much of this as a present, Miss Gally.”

I looked up. It is a trite thing to say, but in that moment, my skin prickled. My ancient instinct tolled. My head turned towards the hall.   
The rest of the house was silent. It felt empty. All around us, the thundering waterfalls, the thousands of interconnecting rivulets and run-offs, the pools and ponds, dripped and gathered and waited. 

I frowned as Gally tilted her head at me.  
“Daddy,” she sounded far away. Underwater. “What’s wrong?”  
“Honey,” I said, and my voice crackled with some pre-emptive, bone-buried dread. “Where is Winston?”


	3. Chapter three.

I have always had a dog. My Daddy’s bird-dogs when I was a boy, strays from college onwards. I know damn well that they run off. That they get trapped. That they have accidents. This felt nothing like that.

“So where do you remember seeing him last?” 

Gally yawned delicately and I felt angry and powerless.

“Honey. This is important. Where did you go? Was it down that…was it down that lane?” 

I started putting on my coat. Hannibal promptly stood up. He watched my face carefully, and it was somehow steadying, as if he was holding both arms out to catch me.

Gally nodded, still shovelling in a mush of fruit and cream. I gritted my teeth; from our first day in the village, of course she had gravitated towards it; a swamped, abandoned path at the end of the valley. Once, it might have led out of Ffynnn Ddu entirely, now it was clogged with some odd, half-submerged kind of a grove that perversely looked older than the rocky cleft it filled, the trees hunched over in the sodden soil, ancient and arthritic, so that their branches drowned as well as their roots. 

“Teresa said it was on her Papa’s maps. They’re all funny and made of paper but his company said it was all they could find on the village. On one of the really old ones it says there’s an underground river right there.” She waved a grubby hand behind her. “Then a big underground…cavern. That’s why people stopped going that way. They kept getting swallowed up. Sub-side-dance.” 

Gally paused. My expression leeched some of the self-satisfaction out of her. Hannibal deliberately relaxed as she glanced, a little uncertainly, towards him, and I felt so warm. Not so alone. 

“Sounds intriguing,” he said evenly, offering her a soft white handkerchief to ruin. “Could Winston be with Teresa, Miss Gally? Some people really like animals.”  
She shrugged, blinking.

We all walked out into the main street. There was nobody around. The rain drifted and made the air tacky. All I could hear was water. The constant static of it in my head. The whispering white noise of it. I called for Winston, knowing that if he was close by he would already have come home. Hannibal checked at the guest house where the Wzrosky’s were staying, but he shook his head, kind of annoyed, as he came out and re-joined us. 

Without really wanting to I finally let my eyes slip downward, away from the bedraggled buildings. All of the curving lower slopes and all of the gushing cascades, all time and space and matter seemed to drain downwards to that point, everything trickling endlessly downwards, all hope and light, flowing down, down towards the dark, wet groin of the mountains. 

The safe grey paving of the replacement road forked upwards just before the older one sank down, and I had an urge to hoist Abigail up onto my shoulders and take its winding course over the hills and away right there and then. Back to concrete and traffic noise. Back to people who didn’t melt away into the mist and streets that didn’t change their course from one day to the next. 

“Perhaps Miss Gally could keep me company as I check some of the alleyways?” Hannibal stood a little closer as he spoke, and reached into his pocket. His words grew low and soft across the back of my neck. “This might be of use.” His hand touched mine as he passed the knife between us. 

And I shivered hopelessly and closed my eyes, desire like a blade in me, from his mouth to my skin.   
Despite everything.   
Despite it all.   
Desire.


	4. Chapter four.

I needed to cut through clinging vines almost as soon as I started down the track. I looked back once, seeing my neighbour and daughter watching, hand in hand, from higher ground. An amputated tendril snapped back and struck my cheek and I swore out a crude word that was instantly submerged into the deep, old silence. Stinking sap bled out from the severed stem and spurts of it burned on the side of my face. Spitting on my cuff I rubbed the worst of it away. 

The paving became a slick hide of moss. More speckled veins wound around my legs and arms. I pushed on. 

Pretty soon I was shambling through a sluggish, scummy ooze, with an undulating musculature of foliage on all sides. Here and there along the shallow banks were traces of Gally’s endeavours, little heaps of dirt and small divots in the mould; how she and the other wisp of a girl had got this far I couldn’t exactly fathom. 

The thorns grew longer. My hands bloodier. The trees linked limbs overhead and there was no light that was not filtered through the fleshy membrane of their leaves. Bloated insects flitted soundlessly across my vision. There were tiny stings on my body as they landed and bit, landed and bit. 

After a while, the gap grew too narrow even for a medium-sized dog to have passed through. The whole thing seemed stupid. I stopped. I had lost all sense of distance. I was infinitely more tired than I should have been. 

And then I felt it. 

Fear. 

Not mine. 

Not mine.  
But then it was mine. 

Mine. All mine. All mine. All _mine_. 

A sudden, nauseating sense of trespass came upon me. Gleeful, hate-filled hostility. It curdled in my stomach. I began coughing up bile, choking down saliva. I couldn’t breathe through it. I started to panic, to sweat, my hands shaking with ague. 

Then there were sounds. 

Then there were movements. Nearby. 

If I could have run, then I’m sorry, but I would have run.

Then, in the gloom, and the isolation, and the doubt, I saw the glint of the blade in my hand. Hannibal’s blade. It trapped my twitching eye, like a flickering fly caught in the gleaming amber of it. The metal was almost glowing, it was almost golden, as if alloyed with the dawning sun itself. So sharp, so perfectly balanced. I felt warmed by it, and I lifted up the impossible weight of my arm and I let the knife fall. 

I cut. And cut. Again. And again. 

I sawed, steadily, through one arterial stalk after another, wiping gouts of green discharge off my clothing and off my skin as I went. 

And I kept on, for minutes or millennia, until the tight, contracting channel of vegetation gave way to a clearing. There were rocks and clouds overhead so that it seemed almost underground. It was flooded with a matte, dark liquid so startlingly glacial that I gasped aloud as I fell in. 

Winston. I stood up, and put my hand to my mouth. He was there, up to his soft brown belly in the vile void of the water, tied by the neck to a stump, to a rising fist of rotting wood, and he was quaking with fatigue and cold and he was staring right at me, so terribly resigned that it hurt in my chest that I still might fail him. I sloshed up to him, talking brokenly to him, and I hacked at the fucking twine that held him in that foul fucking place until he was free. 

Then I picked him up and held him and he started whining and hid his muzzle in my neck. 

Fury fuelled my egress.

The rain in the village had grown heavy and obscuring but Hannibal was looking out for us as I staggered up the rise. He threw a blanket over Winston and took him from me, lifting him onto the table as if he was only a pup. 

I breathed in, dizzy. Got a towel.

“He is unharmed. But in shock,” Hannibal appraised calmly, with deft strokes to Winston’s soaked fur. I just nodded and turned to Abigail.

She was reading a huge, heavy book full of architectural pictures that I guessed was on loan.

“And what exactly were you goddamn thinking?” 

My daughter opened her eyes wide. For a moment, just for one moment, they were cold, opalescent, cooler and harder than ice, but then the implacable, the heartless infant thing was gone and she ducked her head.

“I mean, Jesus, Abigail, I know you think he’s a nuisance but I never thought that you’d actually mistreat him. What were you doing, tying him up like that? Did this…Teresa put you up to it? One time you get a friend you start showing off?” 

“Will.” Hannibal spoke quietly. I stopped waving my arms in the air. “If I could trouble you for my bag..?”

I stomped back over, taking off my glasses and cleaning the dirt and slime away with hands that were torn and still trembling. 

“Sure. Shit. Sorry.” I passed him a worn satchel. 

The rain was running onto the tiled floor and I kicked the back door shut. Any day now I expected the whole crappy place to get washed away. I felt like it would be a blessing.

“Firstly, we must raise his core temperature. But slowly.” Hannibal looked at me until I raised my eyes to his. “And Will, forgive the criticism, but I have seen Gally’s shoelaces. I very much doubt she was capable of this.” He got out a thinner version of the other knife, even down to the carved horn handle, and pointed it at Winston’s neck. 

I frowned at the looping, intricate knot. It looked secure, but fancy. Some of the strands were in different colours. Ash-black and clay-red. “It seems…over-elaborate,” I said cautiously.

“Yes.” Hannibal sliced it off with a flick of his wrist. He mouthed the word I had thought of but not said. “Ritualistic.”

We bathed Winston a little and got him settled in front of the fire. I was scalded with fever, inside and out. Gally was humming away to herself in the kitchen. I could hear the glossy pages squeaking as she returned to Hannibal’s world. Palaces and piazzas. 

I should have been happy. Instead, I wanted nothing more than to lay down on the drab floor in my wet, filthy clothes and never get back up. 

But then Hannibal stroked my cheek, once, unexpectedly, and he murmured, “I will make us all something comforting to eat.” 

“Wait,” I reached out and shuffled nearer, and then we were knee to knee. He had on some kind of cologne. Herbal. Like a sweet-fern sort of smell. I drank it in. Wondered if his skin tasted that fresh. Wondered if there was some way I could find out.

“Look, I…know I’m coming off as…not exactly stable…”

He smiled seriously, a tilt of the lips. The fire reddened his eyes.

“So far, I have seen you justifiably concerned for an innocent creature, and simply navigating the difficult task of parenting in a trying situation. It is I that should apologise, Will, for intruding.”

“God, no,” I said. “I…I want you to intrude…I mean, I appreciate the help.” 

He excused himself to go get some supplies from next door, and for a moment I stood, puzzled as to where he was going and why, as if he had always lived with us, as if he wasn’t actually just another transient person we had just met, another person who came and went in our lives, with his own shit to deal with. 

Gally padded in, warily, at the sound of the front door closing.

“Honey. I’m real sorry.” I quickly went to her and hugged her tightly. “I know you wouldn’t…harm anything…”

“S’okay,” she squirmed a little. “I know you love Winston. I just forgot all about him.” Winston beat his tail faintly as she said his name. “I got dis-tract-ted.”

“And I was confused, honey. And to tell you the truth, a bit scared.”

She was restive in my embrace. “I wasn’t, Daddy, it was just like Mom’s stories,” she said soothingly.  
I smiled that she remembered something of Eleri with cheer; my vaults were not so very full of such treasure. 

“’Specially when those funny voices started telling me things.” 

It was so dark. I held her away from me, her thin face in shadow.

“What?”

Hannibal tapped the door courteously and walked on in, holding a covered bowl.

“Ooh, is that rice pudding, Hans?” Gally clapped childishly.

“Abigail. What voices? Was someone there in the woods? What did they say?”

“With nutmeg?”

Hannibal nodded at her but inclined his head towards me, his fringe dripping rain. She obeyed his instruction by answering me with a bored sigh.

“No-one was there, Daddy. And I don’t speak enough Welsh yet to know what all the words were. There was kind of a laughing too so I thought we were having fun. Anyway, Teresa got all silly and crying and she wanted her Papa and so we came home. Now can I have supper?” 

I walked straight out of the cottage and through the deluge until I got to Great Aunt Delyn’s shop.


	5. Chapter 5

When Eleri drove away from us on that final, fatal night, towards the icy, crooked knuckle of the road, towards her spinning death, she was wearing the dress she had on when I met her. 

Those handful of years earlier, I had slumped against the hotel bar, asked her for a beer and some fried shrimp and thought; maybe someone else feels as dislocated as I do. She was so quaint, with her green thorns faded to soft apostrophes, with her pink roses and pin-tucks and the promise of petticoats. 

Delyn had on something black in the same style, but on her the home-spun managed to look faintly regal, as if such simplicity was a condescension, a show of support for the peasantry. 

“Noswaith dda, William.” Delyn craned her neck to look around me, and a sudden howl blew back the moonbeam of hair that always slanted across her face. “Hmmm, just you. I see. And who exactly have you entrusted with your precious daughter on this unruly night?”

She allowed me to step inside, cossetting herself back into place, covering up her prosthetic eye with a swish of silver strands. 

“A neighbour.” I wanted to honour him differently, but caution tied my tongue.

The door creaked and it was a tomb-lid closing. The hallway was unusually empty; the rank cat-basket of mewling generations had abruptly been removed, even if the odour and the claw-marks lingered. “Your familiars all abandon you, Delyn? Losing your touch?” 

There was a long, still moment. Our anger was a clean, bright thing in the staleness of the vault. Eventually, my opponent shrugged one shoulder. The fringe of her shawl cobwebbed her fingers as they clenched and betrayed her.   
“Ah, yes, of course,” she smiled slyly at me, “you’ve been entertaining the elderly nobody-next-door.” 

I stepped no further into the establishment. I hated it, her graveyard of stolen heirlooms. Once-loved belongings, now ransomed by fate, no longer cherished but buried out of all usefulness. Delyn meandered her way through the tattered hand-fans and crazed urns and petted them as they decayed. She caught up a tarnished salver and displeasure rippled the reflected lustre of her face.

“Always scribbling and sketching in those wretched little books of his,” she tilted her head slightly. Touched one ageless cheekbone. “That man may have money, but I find him quite uninteresting.” 

I privately applauded Hannibal’s reticence. If Delyn had dug out the clay of him, if she had found out any of the ordinary dung that might be a part of any fulfilled existence, she would have shaped it and crowned me with it right there and then. 

“Speaking of trust,” I said calmly, “was there someone you should have warned me about here? Out of familial courtesy? The identity of the local sadist, perhaps?”

I only doubted whether Delyn had sanctioned Winston’s misadventure, not that she had knowledge of it. 

Mild amusement swept her off into the kitchen at the back and she retrieved a glass full of plum-coloured liquor. She offered me nothing. On the shelves and dresser were baskets of eggs, loaves, apples and a cheese. All part of the tribute Eleri had used to joke scathingly about. Delyn’s due.

“Hmm, but what of your powers, William?” She tapped her temple with one ivory fingernail, “empathy still on the blink, is it? Poor, disenchanted Eleri, wedded a magician, woke up with a clown. Did the precious gift of love really stop you from seeing who is who and what is what?” 

I looked at her for a while, as the numerous clocks ticked away, counterpointing the discordant storm.   
“I see Abigail.” I remembered meeting the serious, tiny girl for the first time, at Eleri’s place, so clearly, that I nearly smiled. I had known from then that I would protect her. No matter what. “I see those that are on our side, Delyn, and those that are not.” 

She drank with a slow sip, her mouth stained damson. “Then why come here, William? To a humble shopkeep such as myself?”  
I rolled my head on my shoulders. Shivered at the past owners of her woeful antiques, as they clattered the stoppers of the cloudy decanters, haunted the shattered mirrors with downturned mouths.   
The priest expects you to kneel. The lord wants you to acknowledge their fiefdom.   
But I was tired. Aching. I just wanted to go back. To go back and be with Gally. To be with him. To be warmed. To be nourished.   
“You win,” I told her, finally. “If you’re deluded enough to believe that Eleri stayed away for all those years for a clown, then consider me punished. But if you wanted me and Abigail to pack our bags, you could have just said so.”

I opened the door and allowed the wind to scatter the phantom bones that lay, wracked and regretting, on the worn-out ottomans.   
Delyn stared unevenly at the cat-basket. Bitterness greyed her face.   
“Oh no,” she raised her gleaming head and spoke beyond me to the water that was greasing the cobbles and softening the bricks and rotting the fruit on the branch. That was funnelling in ever-increasing spirals down into the valley. That was drowning us all.   
“I do not want Abigail to leave, William.”   
Her smile was dark and wet. 

“No-one in this whole village wants Abigail to leave.”


	6. Chapter six.

The far-between street-lights went out as I waded back down the hill towards the cottage. I didn’t envy Teresa’s Papa. The electricity supply in the valley was catastrophic. 

Hannibal met me at the door, candle-lit. Concerned. He looked at my face. Really _looked_ at it, as if what it showed meant something to him. 

“All is well here,” he touched my sleeve so gently that I had to bite my lip. “Although I am afraid Gally used up the remaining hot water before retiring with Winston to her room.” He put a key onto my palm. “Be my guest, Will, please. I want you to help yourself to whatever it is you need.”

I let myself in to his place. Silent, but for the weather. The unfamiliar black was serene, unthreatening. I took off my fouled clothing on the flagged floor of the kitchen and lit some lanterns of coloured glass. I opened cupboards and brewed some woody, spiced tea. After a moment I topped it up with scotch. A little honey. 

The furniture was sparse, the books plentiful, esoteric. Disturbing, even, were it not for his interests and career. There were different painting materials on the side-table. On the chair and on the mantle. 

I fingered over Hannibal’s things. Sipped. Wandered, naked. 

Some of the sketchbooks were full of fragments, some held finished portraits and landscapes. Most were of Ffynnon Ddu, and as I glanced at them the village came into focus for the first time; by fixing them in form and shading, Hannibal had pinned down the elusive inhabitants, made solid the floating houses, channelled the streaming pathways. There was an expression of resentment in many of the pencilled faces, as if they realised, too late, how Hannibal had netted them with his sure, grey lines. 

Even the still-life compositions, the studies of local produce at the greengrocer, of tall grasses overgrowing a stile, thrummed on the fine, heavy paper, as if trying to escape Hannibal’s faithful, inexorable taming. It lent the most mundane objects and countenances a shifting, macabre tone that intensified the more I pored over them. 

By contrast, his pictures of Gally were delicate, incomplete, just respectful, feathering impressions. 

I stopped when I turned the pages and saw my own image. I closed the ledger. I couldn’t possibly look like that. 

I went upstairs slowly then, under sheaves of flower-heads and foliage that had been strung to dry in the stairwell, above the doorways, the air pungent with their herbsong. I cleaned off the disgust and the grime of the unending day with Hannibal’s pharmacopoeia of potions, which were heady and of natural stock; home-made concoctions that tingled on my scrubbed skin, entered my blood and made my pulse throb more meaningfully, more honestly beneath all the diffidence and pale defences. 

The smell of him on me. In me.

My hands lingered, lathering. Longing. 

I had been alone and Hannibal had helped. I had been scared, I had been angry, and Hannibal had helped. 

I walked out of the bathroom and took one of the lamps slowly up to the bed. Touched the pillows. Opened the bedside drawer and found clean, folded cotton inside. I picked out and put on a pair of shorts. They hung on my hips and clung where I was wet. I sat on the bed and smoothed them between my legs. I thought about the material. Where it had touched Hannibal. Where it touched now. I breathed hard. Harder. I pushed myself against the seam, let my feet slide further apart on the knotted rug. The floor length mirror showed my outline, wanton against the creamy bedlinens. My hand covered, squeezed, knuckled. My eyes darkened and sparked with yellow.

I panted and pressed until I could only just make myself stop. 

I didn’t want to. Arousal saturated the room. 

Seeking a distraction, I looked around. On the nightstand was a picture frame, one side slotted with people who may have been relatives, the other with a photograph of a younger Hannibal. He was on a beach somewhere. A guy with inked arms was kissing him messily on the neck. Hannibal was showing teeth. His eyes were pleased. Slitted. Dangerous. 

I finished the drink. Blew out the oil-lamps. Went to go and get that smile for myself.


	7. Chapter seven.

I skidded and lurched slowly back through the savage green of the gardens. Back through a gate, back through a door.

Hannibal was working at the candle-lit kitchen sink with his sleeves folded up. Cleaning Gally’s exhumed treasures. As he had promised. He turned neatly towards me. A dancer. A fighter. Greyish slip trickled from his fingertips, silting the floor. There was a smudge of it on his cheek, a little in the fallen fringe of his hair. An artist. A restorer. 

“Will.”

Whatever was banked behind his eyes, behind that burnt sugar, sweet and shining and hard as glass, it flared and continued to flicker as I went to him. Until I was close enough to invite touch. My body hurt from waiting. It ached like I had been waiting for him for years. Squalls hit the glass behind him, slamming off the mountainsides, punching us all down. 

“Come. Come to the fire,” he gestured towards the living room.

“Why?” I answered quietly. “I am _ardent_ around you, Hannibal.”

He raised steady, muddy hands to my chest. His touch was firm. The clay was cool and slippery. 

He could push. He could not push. 

“A shade over twelve hours, Will.” Warm, yet a warning.

“You don’t have to tell me. I know it’s ridiculous. I _know_.”  
I wanted to hide my face. I wanted to watch him touch me. 

If Gally and me left in the morning, I wanted something to keep.

He turned his wrists, delicate and strong as angel’s bones, and wings of wet earth unfurled across my clavicles and curled outwards to my shoulders. Ferns and feathers trailed muddily down my arms. Nerve to nerve, each frond an umber stain, his calligraphy upon me. I felt his breathing quicken as he put a glyph of slick, wet need across my heart, in a language new and old. His two thumbs brushed, parted, smoothed; a protection, a prelude. 

“Who’s the guy?” 

Immobile, his canvas, I looked past Hannibal’s neck, flushed against the pale cotton grain, to where dark things moved outside. 

He made earthen antlers of my ribs. Didn’t pretend ignorance. 

“Tony is the past, Will.”

“Looked kind of…present.”

“A fleeting satisfaction.” 

My teeth bit down at the thought.

“I keep his image close.” Hannibal took his hands away. Surveyed his moth, his stag, his flowers of dirt upon me. “To remind myself of how he died.”

I remembered Eleri’s funeral. Rage. Fear. Relief. Gally’s face under a black umbrella. Tears of sleet alone. No-one from Ffynnon Ddu had come, either to pay their respects or to claim Abigail for their own.

I swallowed. “And how…did he…die?”  
“Something killed him.”

“And how…did that…happen?” 

Hannibal picked up a cloth. Wiped his hands. The caramel burnt darker. 

“The investigations were inconclusive.”

I nodded, for some damn reason. We stood. 

I wanted to let it re-connect. The supply. To let my empathy crackle and glow along my neural paths, to let it light up Hannibal’s mind for me. To be certain once again. To know. 

But I dared not. Like one of the ornate blades I had seen over at Hannibal’s place, it cut both ways. 

I looked up at the ceiling. 

“Gally?” 

“Is sleeping. Warm milk is a renowned soporific.” 

“Winston?” 

“I took the liberty of administering a sedative.”

I shivered. Not from cold. I moved until I was pressed against him. Until I was smeared over his white shirt, his creation destroyed between us. The smell of loam and summer and soap rising, rising with the faint scent of his pulse, the damp of my borrowed shorts. 

Hannibal was very still. 

I reached blindly up. My palms skimmed the muscles of his arms. I felt like I would die from it. “I want to kiss you. Can I undo this?” 

“Will. I am concerned that the grove may be venomous.” He was staring into my eyes. 

“What?” I let go of where I had bunched his clothing up in my fists.

“Gally heard voices. You have been…confrontational. Spores or sap from some native species may have mildly poisoned you.”

I shook my head. “You think this is..? You think this is because I’m high..? I thought you…”

“Let me care for you, Will. I have an anti-toxin of my own devising. Come to the sitting room and I can treat you.”

“You want to play doctor right this second?” I blinked. 

In reply, he brought one hand up to my neck. The other gripped my hip. He pulled me tightly to him and we exhaled together. We were both hard. Both hungry. He brought his mouth to my ear.

“I am scrupulous over issues of consent, Will.” 

It was promise enough. He led me by the hand towards the fire.


	8. Chapter eight

I hadn’t realised I had so many small, sly wounds. Thornpricks and nettle-bites. Botanical blisters. 

Hannibal sought them out one by one as I lay, desperately displayed, in front of the shifting mosaic of an unseasonal fire. My limbs were veined marble, heavy, pearlescent with rain, remote and sublime as in one of those goddamn stupid sketches. Legs arched for him, back vaulted, arms pillaring my head. Blue flame, crimson, and cracked geometries of gold reflected in my mind; the peacocking heart of a Justinian church melting and reforming endlessly before my flushed face. 

The liniment was similarly jewelled; fragmented petals enamelled me as he anointed my instep, my vertebrae, the hollow of my elbow, the crescent of my hip, making me crave more of his swift, sure ministrations. It dripped and seeped into me until I was swollen with it, purified, full of Hannibal’s honeyed, heady medicine. 

My head rolled with want, my hair a dark halo of tangles. On the hearth the old metals were piled to dry, the witch’s offerings, scarred, scrubbed, molten in the shuddering light. Buckled coins for sockets, rusting chains for wrists. Broken trinkets for a broken man, perhaps. I reached out, but Hannibal stayed my hand. 

“You need no ornament save adoration.” He paused, then removed a silver ring from his own finger. Dressed me with it. The serpent coiled twice and rested its blunted head on my knuckle. “You are too lovely,” he murmured, rising to close the door. 

When he came back to me, to crouch above me, his eyes were huge, black and bronze and devouring. The stillness, save our soft panting, was dense and holy. I parted damp thighs. Closed them, helplessly, against the growing ache inside. 

“Please,” I begged quietly. “Just unbutton this a little, Hannibal.”   
I ran the back of my hand, bearing his twisting gift, up the column of his throat. “I want to see you. Please. Let me.”  
Our hands twined and parted draped white so that I could look. “God,” I breathed, putting out my tongue to slick my lip. “God, Hannibal. Please...”

He worshipped then, intent and half-revealed; re-tracing his frescoes, lapping at my skin, tautened with baking clay, scratching runes into the flaking flanks of his beast on my belly, adding lines of red. 

“I would have you stay, Will,” he whispered, words sliding up inside the creases of me, reverence at war with urgency.  
“Stay. There is much I could show you.”

I swallowed down the pleasure of it all, down into my scorched throat, pulling him in, moaning gently at the weight, at the collapse of the church upon me. 

“Can you…please…? I know we can’t…But can you just..?”

I felt Hannibal’s smile, spearing my neck. He kneeled, shoulders bared now, dishevelled and shimmering with sweat. 

“Like this?” Hannibal uncovered me to the shine of his greasy palm, the heat, the lustration of his spittle. I hissed, lifting my arms above my head. “Like this, Will?”

I nodded, my teeth pinching at my tongue. He opened my mouth with his and drank up my maddened blood, both of us feverish, one of us already lost beyond all hope. 

“Slow,” I spoke blindly to his fire. To his storm. “Go real slow.” 

“Anything.” Hannibal’s voice echoed back, breathless syllables caught amid kisses. “Everything, if I could.”

Spilling the dregs of the bowl along the length of me, he offered the last drops of oil to the embers, and the perfume wreathed us, the smoke incensed the room until the edges swept outward, away from where I writhed in the firelight, blessed by him, until there was no cottage, no dank, defeating village. No demanding. No dead. 

There was only us. Only the long, devotional stroke of Hannibal’s hand, then time reversed and the long glide back down. Only my heels, grinding on the rough pile. Only the silent, secret, slippery motion. Again and again, but never enough. The pressure domed me, slits of light and imperial glass pushing into the backs of my eyes. 

“Hannibal.” I had no voice. Needed none, as the white stars rushed through the cobalt, as the ceiling of eternity parted for my muttered prayers alone. 

“God. More. No. Please. Just…”

“Will.” Again and again, Hannibal answered. 

“Please…” I stretched out my hand to his face. He bit down on my thumb, the deluge of him released. I held his skull, the snake scraping the flesh open as I gripped too hard, as I guided his descending mouth to me, delivering myself into a divine hell; my heart pulsing at the blood and breath. Smoke and rite. A benefaction accepted, as Hannibal bowed his head over me. 

And the candles choked with wax.   
And the fire crushed itself into ashes.   
And praise in my name trickled from his lips.


	9. Chapter nine.

Thus began the most beautiful few days of my life. 

Those first mornings; awakening to primroses of light blotching my bed, pale, perfect, the dawn wrung out like wet muslin, diaphanous and dream-like. My whole body flushing warm with memory beneath the sheets, beneath the soft motley of petals I could still feel thumb-printing my skin. I was unknotted, loose, picked apart, yearning to be made back up, by artisanal hands, into a new design. 

I lay listening, drowsing, secure, to the impossible music of Gally singing Nina Simone downstairs, to the clatter and savour of Hannibal at work in the kitchen, conducting Gally’s performance from the stove. My discarded clothes were folded on the chair, a glass of iced tea suffused with water-mint stood close by, and, most mercifully of all, there had been no nightmares; if I was tired, if I was distracted, then it was for gentler reasons than having been hag-ridden. 

Even after the wordless promise of the night before, I had been decided in my intention to gather up my few belongings and leave, but Gally, usually so tractable, had mutinied.  
“Pancakes, Daddy,” she squawked as she fanned out three placemats I didn’t know we owned. “Lith-oo-anian ones. And Hans wanted us to try blood sausage. He made it all by himself.”  
“Uh, well, I guess it would be rude not to…” 

I peered into the skillet. Hannibal smiled slightly, humming a contented coda, looking as if he had slept in the dog’s basket. Hair rucked up, shirt wrinkled and spotted, barefoot on the muddy tiles. The gash I had made to his cheekbone the night before, and another cut on his wrist, were held shut by tape. 

I wanted to bite into him. 

Instead, I folded my arms across the worn t-shirt I had thrown on, still hopelessly joyous from his marks upon me, visible or not.

“I hope you are well rested, Will?”  
I nodded a swift, shy grin, unable to trust my reply, rubbing across my stubble to occupy my hands. Gally noticed the ring, of course.  
“Why did Hans give you his snake charm, Daddy?”  
“Oh, honey, this is just…” I moved to take it off, but Hannibal covered my fingers, warmly, with his.  
He put his lips to my cheek. “Please, a talisman has greater power when it is gifted to another.”  
He whispered, “I watched you fall asleep; perhaps its magic kept the bad dreams at bay?”  
I wanted to answer; no, that was you, but Gally had squinted from the ring to me to Hannibal.  
“Oh, are you engaged now? Can we live together in one of your houses, Hans? And can I use your camera and dark-room? Can you take me along when you have fencing lessons? Please.” 

Hannibal garnished our food with some kind of edible flower and explained quite seriously about the conventions of courtship, while I blushed endlessly and poured the coffee.

“Anyway, honeymoons aside, you know that regular holidays have to end, right, honey?”  
Wiping her hands on the big white apron wrapped around her waist, Gally frowned. “But this is different, Daddy. You said this was a pill-grim-age.”  
“I did?”  
Hannibal put down his cup and said he would inquire whether Winston was at all interested in brunch. I was careful not to reach out for him as he passed by. Gally wasn’t the only one wildly and childishly extrapolating. 

“We need to leave Ffynnon Ddu, Abigail, ok? Great Aunt Delyn…well, I just don’t think it’s very friendly here.”  
“No.” My daughter had narrowed her eyes. Her lashes caged and shadowed them. Her voice was flatter, older. “I want us to stay for a while longer.”  
“Someone played a mean trick on Winston,” I explained. “And we have to think about how that might make him feel. Remember that’s what we practised?”  
“Hans has already made him better,” she stated mulishly, cutting her wurst into precise pieces, little knuckles bleached. “And you said we should always show bullies how strong we are on the inside.” 

I had chewed the peppery scramble. Swallowed it down, reddish clots and all. Breathed. Gally had put on her gingham pinafore, Hannibal clearly being honoured, but like most of her things it was well-worn. Besides regular trips to museums and libraries, she didn’t ask for much. Unlike Eleri, she was content with the things I could afford, or arrange. Unlike Eleri, there were no tantrums, no discontent, no pointless, passionless arguments. 

And evidently no running, when things got tough. 

I had brushed a few curls away from Gally’s small, set face. “Ok, we don’t have to go back home right away. But we could visit somewhere more fun. Standing stones or art galleries or sculpture trails. This place is kind of…soggy, don’t you think?”

Hannibal returned, reporting quietly that the patient was certainly well enough to travel, if I was resolved on that course of action.  
“Well, it’s not raining today, Daddy. And we always entertain ourselves, don’t we? Hans could come on a nature walk with us. With a picnic?”  
Hannibal immediately demurred and helped Gally to a second stack of the neatly-browned pancakes. I had glanced at the immortal curve of his jaw, the delicate down that shimmered along the line of his forearms.

His mouth. 

“It isn’t cool to just…invite people along to the things we like,” I murmured.  
Gally apologised prettily. “Sorry, Daddy. I was just excited that we both had a friend.”  
It was a pretty good effort.  
Hannibal reached over and patted her hand, as if he understood and valued the attempt at sincerity.  
I found myself agreeing to remain until the week’s lease ran out. 

Gally looked down at her bloody plate and smiled.


	10. Chapter ten.

And those afternoons, so rinsed and rooting; everywhere sprouting, uncurling, tendrils crawling over the shining cobbles, shoots pushing up through crumbling cement as if willing my passion onward. The hot fecundity of the valley had a relentless, insatiable edge to it, and, as the air glowed greenly between the heavy thighs of the mountains, we took to hiking away from Ffynon Ddu, while the villagers melted around corners and simmered silently behind their half-open doors.

Hannibal led us across plough-pleated fallow fields, along old, uphill paths, each girdled with brambles and hawthorn, where the blossoms sweated out a deep, glandulous scent as we brushed by. The landscape was ours alone; the only farm-hand we ever saw had an ugly, scarred stump protruding from his left sleeve and shunned us whenever we drew near.

But we needed only each other, Hannibal lifting Gally and Winston effortlessly over stiles and across riverlets, careless of the marsh-mud on his calves, careless of the staining juices and saps on his cotton shirt, so fine that I could see the stretch and pull of muscles beneath. He knew the names of trees and of the raptors watching solemnly from atop distant fence posts. I gave him the names of butterflies and iridescent beetles and basked in the luxury of his long glances and golden approbation. 

Once, we clambered right up onto the humped backbone of Tympath Wrach, gowned in a patchwork nap of velvet scrub. Below us, and mirrored on the other side, where the tall twin hill shouldered the sky, the mountainside was entirely cloaked in streams, ribbons of white and neon-blue and crystal tapestried out across the fields and backroads, tasselling wherever the land abruptly ended in a waterfall. 

Hannibal crouched on a jointed outcrop of cool rock and brushed his hair back from his face.   
“An inundation indeed.”   
“No shit,” I muttered, captivated by his very gestures. Anew and again, each time drowning a little deeper. “Sorry. I mean, yeah. Where the hell is all that water going?”  
Gally alighted studiously next to Hannibal on her own little seat of stone.   
“The Black Well, Daddy. Under the earth. And when it’s full enough, the witch will float up from the bottom and climb out. I told Teresa all about it, but she wouldn’t even let me lower her in.”  
“Right,” I said, circling Hannibal. “Your Mom’s gruesome folk tales.” I had a sudden recollection of Eleri shouting at Gally to leave the battered old telescope alone and clean her teeth, else she’d be dragged down into that very place, that unholy pit, that reliquary of innocent bones. “I meant…geologically. The risk of an actual flood must be getting pretty high.”  
“I believe records do show that the entire settlement has been submerged several times, with loss of life.” 

Hannibal was opening a flat tin of pencils while Gally held two small hard-backed binders of roughish paper. They had both adopted a similar head-tilt as they gazed at the watery view, two graphite-taloned birds sighting their prey. “Such events no doubt trigger a collective desire to appease whatever local deity they deem responsible for the disaster.”   
He turned his face away. “And the demand is always for something close to the heart. Something irreplaceable. None of the old gods could be called merciful.”

I thought of the place they had taken Winston to and repressed a shiver at the stupidity of the superstitious. Cruel land bred cruel kin. Winston lolled his tongue and I lay down with one hand in his fur. The furze smelled crisp after the overblown humidity of the mazing valley hedgerows. My old windowless office, the lecture hall at Quantico, even the neglected police file back at the cottage seemed dim and out of focus. Only the skeletal skyline of the peaks seemed defined and sharp and real, only Hannibal’s calm, clear intonation as he discussed perspective and composition, only the nerves he had so recently reawakened, raw and ready beneath my waiting skin, expectant tinder to his inescapable, incendiary presence. 

The clouds moved fast and fresh, like lines of surf, just above our heads. The pencils wagged. The sun boiled the valley. I watched through lowered lids until the soaked patches on Hannibal’s shirt dried back to a smoky grey. 

We usually returned past the large front window of Great Aunt Delyn’s place, and I would see her flicker and fume within the shadowy depths like something finned and fanged, scales of stolen silver clinking against her cold river-bed. Hannibal, flanked by a weary-footed Gally and Winston, would sense my disquiet and hand me an apple, or turn to make an observation, and as I allowed myself to raise an eyebrow, or to match our thoughts together, I felt ripened and wanted against the abrasive scrutiny of the Crone’s one dead eye.


	11. Chapter 11

And oh, the nights. So sweet and searching. 

The warmth of the days pooled and clung. We took our suppers at Hannibal’s table, escaping the encroaching water that seemed to be closer to our own creaking threshold every hour, wailing instead of warbling, taunting instead of trilling. Gally and Winston would lie, coddled in a comforter on Hannibal’s day-bed, snoring together after cold cherry soup or glossy slices of terrine, surrounded by books and sketches, posies and snailshells. 

I would join Hannibal in the kitchen, the music low, the candles flecked with smouldering oud and wild grass. Finding his questions therapeutic, the horrors of our work mutually accepted and examined, the poison of mine diluted between us. Hannibal tinkered with recipes; feeding me. Strawberries, fiery with peppercorns, placed between my lips, the flesh of figs, bathed in apple brandy, bitten from between his fingertips. 

We washed dishes. Sought out contrasts and common ground. We drank birch-bark wine. And we looked. We always looked, sidelong and smiling and with a growing, itching certainty.

I leaned across Hannibal one evening, placing a dainty teacup that Hannibal let Gally use back on the dresser’s highest shelf. He steadied me, hand at my waist, then ran his fingers through the hair at the back of my neck. I shivered in surprise and dropped the tea-cup, which shattered over the floor.  
“Shit. Sorry.”  
“Will, I am afraid it is I who must apologise,” Hannibal moved away. “I am having a difficult time not behaving like a fool around you.”  
Dizzily, I knelt on the cool slate and picked up a sliver of porcelain. It pricked my thumb. The serpent ring glinted in the very last lick of sunset bleeding in from the garden.  
“Eleri died over a year ago, Hannibal. I’m not as fragile as you might think.”  
“I am not disputing your resilience, Will. I do not wish to overstep, however. There is much we do not know about one another. Despite my unexpected feelings, I will respect your responsibilities, the tragedy of your bereavement…”  
“She was leaving us, when she had the accident. The car crash.” I said clumsily.  
Hannibal looked down at me, eyes burning, face unreadable. “I am sorry, Will. I had not wanted to pry.”  
“We argued.” I shrugged. “I had to go to work. She took off. With all her stuff and whatever cash we had in the place.”  
“Abigail mentioned driving while under the influence. But she spoke of sleeping tablets, so I was not sure that she was using the term in the right context.”  
“Always drove too damn fast. Always running…As for the pills…I didn’t know.”  
We hadn’t shared a bed since I had refused to keep loaning out my sanity to the FBI, so I guess her routines were as unknown to me as the rest of her had become.  
“I destroyed the goodbye note when they found the wreck. Gally doesn’t have to know her Mom was abandoning her.” Sharing the shame of it felt like an easement of physical pain. “I knew she wasn’t happy. She kept saying she would need someone stronger than I turned out to be.”

Someone who hadn’t given up a brilliant, strange career.  
Someone who hadn’t turned their back on a gift from hell.

Hannibal took my hand. Drew it up to his mouth and sucked away the bright, bright red. “Then she did not appreciate the strength of supple things.”  
I swallowed, unable to stop myself from tracing his lips with my fingers. “She left Gally there, sleeping all alone in that apartment. Just about killed any…sentiment I had left for her.”  
Winston whined in his dreaming. The garden was wet and still. Not even the bedraggled, roosting birds spoke up.  
“Stay with me tonight, Will.” Hannibal helped me up and put his hands on me, chastely, yet trembling with a need not to be. “All of you. Let me care for all of you, from this moment onwards.”

I wanted to be greedy with him. To take and take from him. Pull it all right out of him and into me, boldly. All the covetousness, all the desire in him I did not need an empathy disorder to see. Take and take and give and give. I had hardly even dated before, yet with Hannibal I felt so damn territorial. Possessive.  
As if he was provided for my pleasure.  
My pleasure alone, and I for his.  
I knew, I _knew_ that we had to be together. That was it now, as far as I was concerned.  
That was it. 

I dragged him, stumbling, grasping, outside, a little way down the path where the honeysuckle and roses grew wild and curtained off a small arbour.  
“Touch me,” I told him, roughly, mouth against mouth.  
His hands were cool and quick. My body insistent. Feverish.  
We kissed and I tongued at his throat, his collarbone, his salty, spicy skin, tugging at the warm silk of his hair until I pushed him away, enjoying the denial of it, the thudding pain of not touching him, knowing now that I could. He breathed hard too, a dark shape in the dusk. I was delirious on the fragrance and the flavour of him.  
The leaves and the pollen and the flowers of the night were in my hair. I leaned back against the trellis.  
“When we go, will you…will you visit? Will you come see us?”  
“Will,” he crowded me to kiss me again, teeth in my lip.  
Then he took two impatient steps away from me, striding out almost angrily along the walk and then prowling back. “If you would let me, I would follow you wherever you go. Believe me when I say I would not have you or Gally out of my company again, ever, through choice.”  
I caught his hand. His eyes glittered in the lamplight from the kitchen window.  
I put his fingers on my chest, sliding them up under my shirt so that they could know the beating thrill of him on me. Then I smiled slowly.  
“Good. That’s good. But, maybe, well, I was wondering if Gally might agree to a sitter one evening, when we all get back. If you could bear to be with just me, alone, for a couple hours. Maybe we could get a cheap motel room someplace.”  
He half closed his eyes.  
I righted my glasses. Put my arms around his neck. Glanced up past Hannibal’s house to where my rented cottage sagged unpleasantly in the gloaming.  
There was something black, moving up the outside wall towards the upper windows.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be very aware there is mention of deceased animals in this part. It is tagged as a horror story, but it should have an extra note, I think.

Something.  
Something like an animal.  
Only not an animal.  
Scaling the wall.

“What is that?” I stepped around Hannibal and started walking down the overgrown pathway, chin tilted up out of curiosity, squinting into the deepening night.

Hannibal stopped me. 

“Stay still.” He spoke in an undertone. “Please, do not move.”

He edged in front of me, while I just stared up at it. Humped, long, emanating cruelty, it crawled across the vertical brickwork until it could peer over the sill into the room. Gally’s room. Where it had been, a trail of slimy matter glinted wetly. It moved in jerks, propelled on flaring limbs. I stood and looked. I couldn’t take in what I was seeing. It swarmed and slipped through the open window. 

“Hannibal,” my voice faded in my throat, “are you seeing that…thing? What in God’s name just went into her room?”  
“Will. Stay in the shadow here. Please.”  
He ran silently back through the door. 

It re-emerged before he did. There was a moon, and it lit up the amalgamated parts of it; some of it bone, some of it wetted fur, some of it flesh. 

I had begun staggering sideways, numbed by the sight of it, when Hannibal stumbled into me and pressed a pair of blades into my hands. He held a third, all of the same glittering, ochre metal.  
“Focus, Will. If it chooses to, it will slay us all.”  
I gaped stupidly at him, but he was fanning a stout bundle of sticks through the air in front of us. Both ends glowed with a low fire and a haze of very white smoke fogged out, like breath on an intensely icy morning. He had assumed a half-crouched stance, shoulders tensed and muscular, and the point of his knife traced shapes in the air. With his elbow he corralled me behind him until we were shuffling backwards. 

“It’s the witch,” I said.  
It slithered down the wall.  
For a second, the mildewed old fence hid its awkward yet swift progress, then at the end gate it reared up and tottered right through into Hannibal’s garden. Right out on front of us, where we stood with our backs to the porch wall. 

Oh. Delyn’s cats, I thought vaguely.

Transmuted into a two-legged whole; and no suggestion that the alchemy had been kindly done.

I supposed, numbly, that it resembled a woman, narrow hipped and with a heaped, messy suggestion of breasts. All of it glistened, visceral and malign. It twitched and convulsed, unrestful, a rusty, not entirely comfortable necromancy at work. The wriggling caused its limbs to slide out of place, its articulation to falter; even as I looked and looked at it, it melted a little onto the gravel path. Its…head was studded, haphazardly, with pointed teeth. From a hole at the front, it spoke to itself in an old alphabet, feline sibilance slicing through the stillness. The stench was of dead water and putrefaction. 

“I can’t…”  
“Be still. Quiet. It cannot be stopped, Will, at least not by any means I have yet learned.”

The witch cast about, searching, but despite the dozen dangling, oozing eyeballs tangled here and there, it couldn’t seem to penetrate the barrier of oily fog Hannibal had put in front of us. 

“It wants…”  
I could scent Hannibal’s sweat. Pleasure had curdled to adrenaline and fear. But the exhilaration remained. He nodded, once, and I instinctively turned my back on the garden and everything it contained. I walked stiffly away from it all, to go and find my daughter.

She was sleeping safely, curled into one of Hannibal’s cashmere cardigans. Irrationally, I wanted to take it away from her. I groped for the bottle on the sideboard and slugged forty-year old whisky as if it was milk. I put my hand over my mouth to stop the pitiful noises from leaking out. I realised I was crying.

I hadn’t stopped shaking when Hannibal came in.

He flicked a concerned glance at Gally then sat heavily in the chair.  
I could tell from the currents of damp air that the back door was still wide open. A sudden chatter of birdsong rose and then fell once more into the still, hot darkness. A news report for the real, the ordinary creatures of the valley.  
My eyes darted madly. “Please tell me that it’s gone.”  
Hannibal took a long while to reply. “Gone, no. Retreated, yes. It could not hold itself together, mainly, using the materials that its worshippers have most recently put at its disposal. To manifest itself.”

“The witch of the black well,” I said it twice to myself, trying to accept the form of the words in my mouth.  
“Indeed. If you can excuse me for a moment I must go back out and…cleanse the ground, burn the…remnants it left behind. Next time it will not be so out of practise, so shambolic, and so I must strengthen the wards of protection around the house. Consult a few of my notes.”  
I waved my hands. “What? We have to leave. Like this fucking minute. I have to get her away. Before it comes back for her.”

It was night. I had no transportation and the only access road was steep and half washed away. I had a child and an elderly dog.  
I sat down abruptly.  
“I can’t begin to…”  
“No.” Hannibal sighed and rested his dagger on his knee. “It is inherently unbelievable, at first, to our modern sensibilities. That such entities exist.”  
Weird weapons and animal sedatives and runes marked onto my very skin. Combinations of herbs in the house, in the food, in the air we breathed. 

The ring Hannibal had bade me keep.

A wealthy, cultured psychiatrist vacationing in a mouldy corner of nowhere like Ffynnon Ddu.

Taking an interest in _us_.  


“Entities?” I spoke sharply enough for Gally to stir at the sound. “Your work on occult crimes…you’re telling me this is what’s really behind them? This…shit? You’re really telling me that, Hannibal?”

He got up. Started sifting nimbly through a stack of drying leaves. His broad back was a wall. I stood right behind him.

“You…expected all this? I mean, what the hell is it really? Someone…deformed, inbred? A rabid bear?” I gripped his wrist and turned him to face us. My voice was cracking, but quiet. “This a…hobby for you? Like an extreme sport? Hunting…freaks of nature?”

He blinked calmly at me. 

“There would be little point in hunting something which, to my knowledge, cannot be killed, Will.”  
“But just now you…”  
“I have a deeply personal interest in _observing_ them. And mark me, these…spirits, beings, call them by whatever name you wish, they can only be _averted_. And then only with a great deal of luck and with certain arcane rituals or objects. Gifts can traditionally appease them, sometimes for many years. If they are not satisfied, then they cause and consume disaster, or they simply take what they require, which, to be blunt, is human sacrifice.”

I staggered back from him.  
Hannibal reached out, but I flinched away and he dropped his hand, returning to his sure, methodical selection, tying up little hanks of specific, pungent foliage. 

His fingers were deft.  
As they had been on me. 

“You know. Knew. You let us, let Gally stay here.” I slowly pulled at my hair. “What is she? Bait? And what am I?”

Hannibal went and got himself a glass of water. 

My nerves were at once unresponsive and too sensitive. I stood, wavering, for long seconds. Time sped up and slowed down by turns. The whiskey began to taste like bleach. I heard the back door slam shut. I smelled the fire. 

I called out to Gally and Winston.  
“Hey guys. Got a great idea. Let’s go for a moonlit ramble.”


	13. Chapter 13

I took the yellow sun-blades with me. A notebook. Filled my pockets indiscriminately, spitefully, with paraphernalia I hadn’t the first idea how to use. And Hannibal’s cardigan had to come with us, seeing as Gally refused to let go of it. The little queen was disoriented, full of sleepy indignation, grumbling for Hans and his goddamn Lithuanian cookies. 

At our cottage I found the kitchen and half the sitting room a foot deep in clotted, stinking liquid. The place reeked. It was chilled, soaked with a foul echo of something that defeated the warmth of the summer night with such an easy, ancient contempt that I nearly returned all of us to Hannibal’s dubious stewardship there and then.

But there was anger to temper the shock, and disbelief to calm the panic. And with everything I had left I was fighting, supressing my disorder, which buzzed like a hornet in the airless bell jar I had endeavoured to make of my mind. 

Now was _really_ not the time. 

I managed, in between bouts of intense nausea, to put some of our gear together in a rucksack and to lace up Gally’s boots while she dozed, sitting, on the staircase. Winston wouldn’t go near the creeping, dark confluence that was soon seeping out across the hall towards us, and I couldn’t blame him. 

Outside, there was a reckless, headstrong tone to the water’s constant song. A purposeful ripple to the very light around us. 

Ffynnon Ddu was _awash_. 

The lower skirts of the mountains were sheeted in coruscating silk, the banks of every stream torn and tattered.  
The streets were beginning to flow.  
And the grove. That place, sodden with everlasting hunger and such an old, old malice, lurking at the base of the sorry village, owning it and feeding off it whenever it chose; that place was already submerged. Already spewing up an answering, transformed flood of its own, already bubbling over with whatever was rising once again from the black well in the earth. 

I looked around.  
Out front of the guesthouse, Teresa and her father were throwing equipment and belongings into their company vehicle.  
Their very sturdy all-terrain vehicle.

“Hey. Hey.” I waded across to their side-road. “Wait.”  
They clambered into the truck. Teresa curled up, cowering out of sight, on the front passenger seat.  
“Goddamn. Just wait.” I stumbled over a hidden kerb and by the time I was on my feet again they were pulling away. As they turned in the narrow space I slammed a hand on the hood.  
“What the hell? We have to ride out with you.”

The wheels ground forward.  
I inched around to the window.  
“I have a child here…”  
“No. What you got there’s no child.” A lean, strained face glared out of the interior. “To hell with you. To hell with your boyfriend,” the engineer spat. “And to hell with your psycho daughter.”  
“Abigail?” I shook my head. “Why..? I mean…”  
Water sloshed across the instep of my boots. The truck swerved a foot forward. I felt suddenly soaked with fear and fatigue. “She’s just a kid. A precocious kid.”  
“Scared Teresa half to death, your little _bestyia_. Luring her to those woods down there. Telling her to jump into some bloody great hole in the ground. Making voices come out of the earth. Teresa hasn’t slept since.” His voice, harsh with panic, rambled on in another language. Finally he glared at me, at Gally, at the whole of Ffynnon Ddu. “Makes no sense why nothing works here…everything breaks down, it is forsaken. Your girl, she fits in well.”  
The truck jolted forward and skidded and swerved around the corner. 

I didn’t try to stop them again.

It started to rain, a soft, filtering of starlight falling between the glittering heights.  
“Daddy?” I turned to see Gally rubbing her hands over her eyes. 

Then the earth sheared apart, and we watched the first of the mudslides rip out a gash in the hillside above the long-abandoned chapel building, sending a wave of rock and dirt to clog the upper junction.

Winston nosed at the back of my leg. I put my hand down and ruffled the grey hair between his wet ears.

At the top of the street, the people of Ffynnon Ddu were drifting into view.


	14. Chapter 14

Delyn, the Crone, the Great Aunt that my wife had hated and envied and run thousands of miles to escape from, smiled, and it was a crack in a glacier, in comfort itself.

“Go back, William,” she shooed. “Sit quietly in your house. Pray if it pleases you.”

I took Gally’s small hand. Hannibal’s serpent twisted against our locked fingers. I edged us over to the lee of the few shop fronts and walked forward more determinedly than I felt. The crowd was a blurred, coalescing body, perhaps no more that thirteen, maybe more, maybe less. All of the congregation had lost something. An arm. An eye. Ears, fingers; old scars still shrieking, without tongue, to me. From the hollow faces and silent, beaten looks of others, those unimpaired by physical sacrifice may have given the most; I sensed incomplete grieving, lives which had been bought which were then not worth the price. The host of them, tidal in its swelling and receding numbers, blending insubstantially as I tried to size them up, poured across the exits of the market square. If we aimed for one corner, the wash of folk ebbed one way, if I guided Gally in the opposite direction, so the men and women faded and swam together there.

And in their midst, immovable, their priestess, their elder, prosaic in a raincoat and boots, queenly with her hair raised like a steel crown, for once drawn up away from that dreadful caved-in socket of a stolen eye. Delyn.

“We have always given the witch what it wants, William,” she called out over the howling ocean that was gradually surrounding us, peat-thickened and rain-frothed from above, and from below, the water tainted with unending rot.  
“The finest of our flint arrow-heads. Beads of carnelian, bought with traded brides. Bronzework and then coin. Creatures of our fields, then of our hearth. Our very meat, our very bones.” 

She pointed at Eleri’s daughter. “But the future is what it craves most of all.” 

“Abigail Hobbs is not your child to offer.” Hannibal said mildly, at my shoulder.

I didn’t turn to him. I really didn’t have to. 

Hannibal’s mystical blinds and bluffs had not parried the witch alone. Delyn frowned. He was nothing to her and she became chillingly amused.

“You have a champion, William?” One thin eyebrow rose and fell. “Delightfully chivalrous, I’m sure. Pointless, of course. And unnatural, I might add.” She quivered disdainfully. “All that kissing.”

Hannibal turned from her and pulled something forward.  
“Miss Gally, if you would do me the honour..?” He was already bending to lift Winston into the belly of the wheelbarrow. 

Words and symbols were written on the wood. Both inside and out. 

And not in paint. 

“Ew. It’s all sticky.” Gally screwed up her face but settled herself regally enough in her odd carriage, something, unhappily, of Delyn’s bearing about her. 

Winston nosed about, curling in upon himself, sneezing and snuffling.

“I apologise that it has not had time to dry. Think of it as pest repellent, and please discourage Winston from licking it all off. I am afraid that to tap off any more at this point would render me unconscious.”

“Yeah,” I hissed over the black steeple of Gally’s hood, “I guess as a family we’ve consumed enough of you already. I’ve been trying to work out if eating your bloody breakfasts means that we’ve assaulted you or you’ve assaulted us.”

Hannibal reflexively checked on the taped-up incision on his arm. “A diet of certain analeptic plants has transformed my body into one of the most powerful protective elements I have at my disposal, Will. It seemed wrong not to share this…armour with those I have come to…care for.”  
“Please. Don’t expect gratitude for turning us into…cannibals.”

We weren’t even facing one another. Hannibal let the inaccuracy slide and gestured to the handles of the barrow. As I hefted them he unsheathed a shotgun from its shoulder sling.  
He aimed it at the head of the village.

“Oh, William,” Delyn laughed. “The witch will have the sweet girl, run with her as you might.” 

Sardonic in her courtesy, she stood aside.  
Sighs purled through the tangled mob.  
The villagers deliquesced.  
Tears in the torrents.

We left Ffynnon Ddu behind us.  
The track was underwater and the weather worsened.  
The way was steep. Hannibal helped me but he was pale and staggered frequently.  
I grunted as the downwash slipped the wheels out sideways. “Couldn’t you have sourced a plastic barrow to escape with?”  
“At least this wood is ash," he replied, "and so has sacred properties of its own. I really had not planned for…”  
He paused. “For a lifetime, I have not known the inconvenience of attachments.” 

His glance fell on Gally and I saw how surprised he was at the breach we had made in his walls.

“My family…” He ducked to avoid an uprooted tree. “…For many years I thought they had been…consumed by starving rogues. Deserters. Rebels seeking to ransack our estate.” 

I dared not stop. Dared not look at him. He laboured upward. Shotgun and shaman’s blood at our service. 

“Later, when I returned, grown, to seek vengeance, I came to understand that what I escaped from that night, what was loosed upon us by an ambitious local warlord was, in fact, similar to what is behind us.” 

Rain ran down the lines of his face. Seraphic, stricken; made hallowed by horror.

I couldn’t help but touch him then. My hand curled around him so naturally, even if all else was beyond understanding. His mouth on mine was warm, and hesitant.

The witch came up from behind. Brought down the mountain upon us.  
It was just rock and water from then on.


	15. Chapter 15

“Wake up, Will. You’re yelling. Again.”

I thrashed a moment longer, as the thing pulled me down with it, down into the deep, and then just as my strength failed, and ruin engulfed me, I opened my eyes.   
A silky arm lay across my chest, gentle, but a restraint nonetheless.  
Her voice in my ear, not too sleepy to be annoyed. 

“You should go see that doctor, _cariad_. The one told me he liked your lectures so bloody much. One with the silly name.” A yawn, such an ordinary sound. “He’d prob’ly treat you for free, get you some Valium or something.”

I unclenched my fists. My skin felt slippery against the air, coated with some unclean afterbirth. I fumbled up to the shelf for my glasses, fingers numb.

“I don’t,” I swallowed, throat sore from all that putrid water. “I don’t…meet people. Especially fanboy shrinks that happen to just…run into my wife at the store.”  
“Well, we can't go on like this, can we? Bad dreams for a solid month now, is it? _Iesu mawr_ , Will, I need to sleep. I’m enrolling Abigail at her new school tomorrow, remember. Ugh, at nine sharp.”

I curled over, to the wall, glowing with reflected streetlight.  
I put my hand on the brightest part, as if the yellow could win against the black. Defeat the demon. Restore what it was stealing from me, night after night.

“Maybe it’s this case I’m on,” I whispered. “The Shrike is…is…”  
“Shh.” Slim knuckles, satiny against my flanks. The lightest scratching of fingernails. An easy rhythm. A well-worn distraction. “I’m glad you get the bad guys, really I am,” she breathed. “I’m glad Jack Crawford loves your work. But don’t bring it home, Will. If you want to talk to someone, ring that journo, agree to that book deal.”

Rustling of sheets.   
I shuddered as my body went from cold to hot. I repulsed myself, but sometimes, only touch saved me from fading out completely.

“Lounds is a hack. I can’t…” I groaned and rolled and helped shed my wet t-shirt. “I won’t sensationalise all that…pain…”  
“Money, Will.” Thumbs plucked at my waistband. “Don’t you want nicer stuff for Abs and me? Pretty things for your pretty family?”

Distraction.   
Such an easy, well-worn rhythm.  
I glimpsed her lazy pout in the half-light, over me, lips moist. Tried not to see the other face, the wet, malformed face. Tried not to feel the suck of it, the sharp, throttling submersion of it, as it took me down, into the dark hole where it came from.

“So, no more noise, _cariad_ , ok?”   
She put her narrow palm flat over my mouth, didn’t notice how I froze at that; rode her hips over mine. 

She glanced over one backlit shoulder to the nursery door.   
“We don’t want to wake our little monster, now do we?”


	16. Chapter 16

Not sheets. Slate. Rubbing. A smooth slide of pain.

Rustling, but...

Heavy limbs crushing down on me, the breath forced out of my lungs, all splinters and sandpapering bark.

A storm of water.  
Shrills of fear.  
Pulled backwards, the ground screaming, slipping.  
Something across my mouth, not a soft hand, but the slap of shredded leaves. Stinging blows to my head, blindness, a rushing pressure.

Choking.  
Choking.  
Down.  
Down.  
A rotting, shapeless maw, needle-toothed, wide, immune to the elemental tsunami it had created to carry Abigail from my arms.

Dweller of my nightmares, its smile as mud-slicked as in my memories. 

There was no Hannibal.  
There was no hope.

Tumbling, beaten by sticks and stones, debris that cascaded with me as the power of the witch brought us back down, down through Ffynnon Ddu. The cobbled streets abraded skin, ripped off a boot.  
I saw houses shift.  
Down.  
Down.  
Abigail.  
My Abigail.  
Mine. Not mine.  
Never mine. Eleri’s bloodline.  
I breathed decay.  
All love and light left me.  
No Hannibal.  
No hope.  
No Abigail.


	17. Chapter 17

_After the fury and the fight of my descent, I was cast into the pit. High, high above me, the mouth of the caldera shone, innocent and bright, an upturned silver pool mocked by the murky cavern below, where the shadows were grey, and light itself was dulled by time and gall alike, and even the honesty of darkness failed and failed again._

My arm was broken. As I stirred, a spear of pain ran me through, lightning crackling behind my eyes. I gasped and retched and my saliva looked black in the diadem of spilled moonlight beneath the cavern’s opening. I spat out muck and blood. My feet lay touching the edge of the subterranean mire, and it bit at them with an iceless cold I had never felt before; I cried out and dragged myself, almost fainting, further up the sloping wall, away from the luring surface of the foul wellspring, past scattering of bones and other brittle treasures. My fingers dug into stratified putrefaction, while I tasted a millennial greed, and smelled a prolonged hecatomb in service of a singular appetite.

Insatiable. Inhuman. Insane. 

Some of the skeletons shattered, so very small as they were, beneath my weight.

“Will?” Hannibal crawled over the mess to me, through the bleak half-light, gory and ragged. “Does it have her? Does it have Gally?”

I buried my face in him; more than just my glasses had been broken.

"Can’t see much…Can’t remember…”

“We are under Ffynnon Ddu, I think. A stone vault, vast, round as a cauldron. It is a charnel house, foul, miasmic…I am not sure…”

He stopped, switching his concentration to me, pressing exploratory touches to my vertebrae, assessing my pupillary response with a calm that derided the situation. We might have been in some fancy consulting room back in Baltimore.  
He wiped away something than was seeping down my face.  
“Are you able to help search, Will?” He was so gentle with me it _hurt_. “We need to look for Abigail with some haste…”

“Don’t have to.” I clung to him. “If I…use my…my…” I tried to breathe through my nose and couldn’t. Hannibal stilled, steadfast. Holding on where I might not be able to.

“I _know_ things, Hannibal…about people…what they are, what they need…what makes them do a certain thing, mostly bad things, but…”  
I hung my head.  
He held me while the dizziness bled back out.  
“There is no need to explain, Will,” he confessed. “I must tell you now that I had heard about you. About your…faculty for forensic psychology. I had even entertained the hope that we could be..." He put his forehead, very delicately, against mine. “But they held you on so short a leash. And I was…more…wary than alone. And then you retired so thoroughly…”

I blinked the blood out of my eyes.  
I wanted to get my daughter.  
I wanted to impress Hannibal.

Ceaseless dripping; I made a mantra of it. Grating of bone in my arm. I used the edge of it. Tried to brace myself, inside my skull. It had been a long time. Maybe too long. The switch was rusted. I had bricked it over and nailed boards over the masonry…I wasn’t sure what might happen if I tore it down and flicked it all back on again. 

But I wanted to find out. 

“You can…see Gally with your mind?”  
“That’s just it,” my voice shook. “Saint or sinner…even the most evil…I mean killers, the most twisted…even when they’re long gone from a crime scene, I know their…design…like an echo of intent…But with Gally...”  
“What, Will?”  
I sobbed once. I had not expected to say it aloud. To anyone. Ever. I had deceived Eleri. Even Abigail herself, in a way. I had told Delyn that I _saw_ Gally. But then lying to the Crone had been a small, mean pleasure in itself. 

“Abigail’s not there, Hannibal.”  
“Not…there..?”  
“Even when she was small…There’s never been…anything…Nothing. I turn the light on,” I scrubbed at my brow, “ _in here_ , I angle the beam to where she should be, and she’s… _not there_. It’s just…a void, where there should be something, human emotions of some kind, good or bad…it’s just…darkness.”

He stroked the bruises on my back.  
Kissed the gashes on my brow.

"Then she is special, Will,” he said. “Unique.”  
The cold was lapping at us now. It frosted his eyelashes.

“And I’m pretty sure she killed her mother.”  
I watched the amber redden behind the silver bars, glorious preserver and reliquary of my desolations, my griefs.

“Why, yes, Will,” Hannibal agreed softly. “It would certainly be within Abigail’s range of skills to manufacture an overdose of narcotics. I have supposed that the automobile accident was an unexpected boon, but I have not asked her. It seemed…rude to do so.”

I could hardly breathe. “But to kill…”  
“Is sometimes necessary for any organism. To preserve an environment that is beneficial to it.” 

I gripped what was left of his shirtfront in both fists. Brought his face closer to mine. “You mean that she did it for _me_.”  
Hannibal nodded, thumbs on the drawstrings of my neck now, to soothe, but not to sweeten certainty, not to unknot the tensions tied up in the truth.

Then I sensed the ripples, a shaking in the frigid air, and he looked up, over my body, at the stygian coin of water as it trembled and birthed the witch. 

“Hannibal?”

I shivered as it rose from the malignant spoonful it called home. Shoulders first, the line of them torn by ragged stumps; a blasphemy of wings.  
I shook with loss and anger and despair.

The witch was stronger in its lair, composed of choice butchery; it stalked up onto the sill with the mammoth limbs of long-gnawed beasts, pinioned and jointed back together with raw and fractured gems. 

Hannibal stood, swaying, pushing me behind him. It approached, twice as tall, dripping from wounds that were not its own, that it delighted in.

“Run, Will.”

Veins of old metals slithered through it, liquid in the cold furnace of its animation. There were tusks. The used parts of men. It phosphoresced with arrested decomposition, haloed with a reeking brilliance.

Gesturing in the unholy glimmer, Hannibal raised his chin and began to incant words I didn’t recognise, slurred vowels and Enochian cadences like a rain of swords from heaven.

It took him without breaking its uneven stride. Despite whatever spells his blood sang, whatever periapts he may have had about him, to the witch, we were just…offerings. It was hulking, limber, bejewelled with dead eyes and organs. It was hunger triumphant. It was rapture made deliverer of death.  
It sliced at his belly with a dagger not unlike his own, immemorial and uncanny, yet sunless, so sunless.  
I heard him groan, guttural and grinding, and it grinned sloppily.

“No, please,” I stumbled forward, falling, “not him too.”

It embraced him, arms barbed with lamented gold.  
Hannibal looked at me, dully, bleeding from the mouth.

“Will…find Abigail…please...and run.”

“No,” I moaned again, trying, trying to wrench him from it, trying to topple it over, make it stop.

But it was might and surety, iron and mist.

“Please don’t.”

“You heard what Daddy said,” a reedy voice chimed from the other side of the chamber. “Put Hans down, Old One.” 

Abigail was sat, miraculously intact, on a mound of gold and silver, the hoard long mossed over. She was playing with some tarnished chains, the links glimmering greenly as she ran them delicately through her grasp. 

“Gally.” I shouted without thinking, throwing the power back on in sheer relief. “Gally.”

Her eyes were pale and reflecting. She said nothing. Her expression did not change.

It was deeper than before, the space where she should have been. The absence. Her absence. It was…richer, more complete, more complex, deeper and dimmer, yet not full grown.  
Not full grown _at all._ Next to it, the witch appeared as just a mere speckled blight, a faded, darkling stain next to Gally’s magnificent, fledgling lacuna. 

“Honey…I didn’t think I’d ever…” Confusion and joy and terror spiked all at once in me, neurons close to overload. As my consciousness started to flicker, I saw the witch turn speculatively away from Hannibal towards my daughter.

“No, no, no…” I began edging around to her. “Please get yourself away, honey. Please, baby.”

Gally blinked, and tucked some curls behind an ear, prim as if at a tea party. Her focus was on the witch.

“I said _put Hans down_.”  
She looked displeased as a slimy chuckle answered her back.  
The witch crowed and slathered.  
“And _I_ don’t like _my_ things being touched,” she retorted, sharply.

I felt suddenly sick at the sound of her. Abigail yet not Abigail. Echoless, like the depths of eternity, filtered through unearthly experience, strange knowledges.

“If you don’t do what I want, I will pull you apart, Old One, Fallen One.” Gally said conversationally, tone smooth and cool as the black well-water. “I will dis-eckt you, dire as you are.”  
The witch hesitated. It sniffed and sidled around to her, milky, beady eyes scorching, Hannibal dangling from its talons like a dolly, hate and curiosity oozing like pus from its costume of skin. 

I wanted to pass out. Wanted to slip down under. I wanted to stop seeing the little girl, my little girl, in her black pixie hood and cape, as she bested and berated a festering wraith.

The witch laughed. Stopped laughing. Paused, unsure of its powers for the first time in a timeless existence, crouching down over her, seething bile and bane. 

“I’d enjoy that,” Gally mused, picking up a torque, enamelled with lichen. “Dis-eckt-ing you. I enjoy knowing how things work, just ask my Daddy. But I don’t really know how _I_ work, yet,” she carried on, entirely unthreatened, “so I need to talk some things over with Hans. He’s very clever, you see. He understands. And Daddy likes him too. Lots.”

She suddenly looked across at me, almost fondly. Smiled the usual, neat Abigail smile.

“So I want to go now, with them both.” She wiped her hands on her coat. “It’s horrid here, and you are dis-gust-ing.”  
She wrinkled her nose and jumped down nimbly from her throne. Her pockets jingled. “Oh," she added carelessly, "and I’m taking some of your shiniest things with me, of course.”

The witch of Ffynnon Ddu chattered with rows of purloined incisors. Bellowed. Cursed Abigail with twisted hymns that cracked the stone walls. Beat its tail until it broke against what it had once broken. 

Abigail hummed warningly, and it stepped awkwardly backwards, placing Hannibal down, gently, in front of her.

He didn’t move. Didn’t try to stop the pulse of life from his gut. It was too late. I put my hands to my mouth, shearing apart inside. I couldn’t even go towards him, to say goodbye.

Gally looked at the witch. 

“Mend him, Old One,” I heard her say, menacingly, before it all turned to fire behind my eyes, my brain burning to keep itself alive. Before I lost my senses, thankfully, one by one. "Mend Hans, most lost, most dire. Or I will remind you of what it was like to fly...”

Her eyes were pale and reflecting. She said nothing. Her expression did not change.

And the witch of Ffynon Ddu, Old One, Fallen one, most lost, most dire...knelt down and kissed the feet of my daughter, the monster.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ending with a Beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for reading! Comments welcome!

I closed the journal and gradually the world returned. Swirling tables under splashes of late summer shade. The scrape and squeeze of boulevard traffic. Maelstroms of warm air greased with a palette of aioli, sesame and sake, ras el hanout. My hand was almost steady as I replaced the book in my satchel with the others, and took up the half glass of beer in front of me. The pills were more bitter than the suds.

The sun slanted onto bright colours and the rushing brush-strokes of the tourists. My head ached. 

“Daddy, we’re back and we brought you a catalogue.” I turned as Gally nudged herself primly onto the chair across from mine. She offered the paper bag from the photography exhibition in exchange for picking over the ample remains of my fries.

A hand tucked itself possessively between my collar and the nape of my neck, pinching the knob of bone there, beneath the grown-out curls. I swallowed. No matter that my memories were like drops of ink in water, fading or flowering as they pleased, my connection to Hannibal was, seemingly, indelible; a clear line upon an uncertain canvas.

A tutting noise in my ear, punctuating the babel around me.  
“I am sorry, Will, this American-style diner came recommended.”  
“It’s fine,” I smiled briefly to smooth away his frown. Gally looked up from my overcooked lunch. Her cheeks hollowed.  
“This isn’t how you wanted the meat. You have it bloody now. Who did this?” Her head snapped up. Growing somehow weightier than a little girl, growing somehow _sharper_ , and with black opal in place of aquamarine, she peered at the waiters performing their intricate, harassed ballet. The hairs on my arms prickled.  
“Honey, I just wasn’t hungry,” I hesitated, then tweaked one of the felt cornflowers on her cloche hat. “I was busy reading Hannibal’s case notes.”  
My daughter blinked furiously.  
“You’ve just read the part where Hans meets the mermaid,” she intoned. “The mermaid that eats his friend, Anthony, while they’re vacationing. You didn’t like reading the parts about Hans and Anthony _at all_.”  
I avoided Hannibal’s wolfish gaze.  
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.” 

I started wrapping the burnt ribeye up in yesterday’s copy of _Liberation_ , careful of the juices on my plastercast. Hannibal had amused himself by daubing sigils all over it. Gally had added cupcakes to the graffiti.  
“But I want to be there for you, Abigail. The _real_ you. So I’ve got to _know_. I’ve got to piece together as much as possible about what it all means. For us. As a family.” 

Hannibal unceremoniously tucked a paper napkin under her trembling chin.  
“Miss Gally, you are worn out, and none of these fine fellows is worthy of a display of your gifts. Once you have gorged yourself on this calamitous cuisine we will return to the chateau and you shall take an afternoon nap.”  
She slowly uncoiled. Spied a plated dessert passing by, glistening umber and creamy ochre.  
“Ooh,” she clapped her hands. “Chocolate _doughnuts_."

I wiped my damp palms on the legs of my cargo pants.

 

We strolled back through the fragrant collage of the street market; Hannibal shopped at the _apothecaire_ , seeking out medicinal herbs for my restorative. I bought Gally a silk scarf with cranes flying up and down the long edges. 

I leaned into him, watching as she danced back and away through the crowd, pastel grey and blue against heaped baskets of viridian and vermilion spice. 

“So,” I ventured, softly, seriously, “it’s been a month since the clinic. We’re mostly patched back together now. And I noticed when we checked in that Gally’s bedroom is practically in a different wing to ours.”  
There was a pause, as Hannibal fought a silent battle with himself. My sore bones were jostled by passers-by while he stalled, but, in our shared stillness, in such a noisy, boisterous plaza, I _realised_.  
Not hoped, or cheated my way into knowing what somebody else’s feeling for me were. I just plain _realised_. 

“Indeed,” he smiled, resolute, but eyes on my mouth all the same. “But as we have plans for tonight, I fear I must prescribe us all more rest this afternoon.”  
I turned into him, and dragged the serpent ring up the front of his waistcoat, snagging on each of the buttons.  
Deliberately.  
Biting.  
One by one.  
“Ok. Promise I’ll nap after we’ve fooled around some.”

The sweet, hot ferocity of our private moments pulsed beneath the thin skim of Hannibal’s poise, of his self-possession, desire’s _pentimento_ ; layer upon layer of the past weeks' passion pushing through, all the pledges, all the patience.  
“ _Will…_ ”  
“Anyway, plans?” I murmured, pleased with the effect. “I gather you don’t mean dinner and a show?”  
My palm dipped and lay flat; the etched and angry scar, grudgingly healing, howled beneath Hannibal’s chalk-white linen, and I shivered with remembrance and rage of my own. Part of me wondered why the hell I hadn’t told Gally to rip the goddamn witch apart, for daring to harm what we _loved_. 

“Regretfully, no.” Hannibal tangled our fingers together, brushing my knuckles briefly over his lips, claiming back his composure. “I thought we might visit the infamous catacombs. Clandestinely, of course. I was schooled for a time here in the city, and know how to access the forbidden galleries and tunnels.”  
I frowned, resisting the foolish urge to ask if it was safe.  
“Uh, didn’t I hear on the news that some backpackers had gone missing? Got separated from the tour they were taking down there?”  
“Both recently and historically, the incidence of travellers disappearing is worthy of interest,” Hannibal commented matter-of-factly. “It is not widely known, but there have always been sacrificial cults associated with the oldest of the ossuaries. And all of the crypts feature in one Parisian legend or another.”

“Oh.” I said, stepping back. “You think there’s one of _them_ down there..?”  
“I am hoping that Gally will find it…educational.”

I kept breathing. Kept a sense of reality. Because this _was_ my reality now.  
Hannibal immediately shook his head. “Please Will, if you do not feel ready, you need only say…”

I closed my eyes and gestured with my chin. It was almost as natural as it had ever been. “Woman by the seafood stand. Fraud. Blackmail. She likes to steal from rich old men.”  
The searchlight was molten, malleable in my mind; mine to direct wherever I wanted. It gleamed, sharp and yellow as the blades we carried.  
Whatever I saw, caught in its radiance, couldn’t scare me now.  
“A drowning, when she was a child. A clear, pebbled river. Her father, weighed down with rocks and failure. She hates him for leaving her. She wants to kill him, over and over.”  
I wasn’t sure whether my _talent_ would help find us answers about Gally, would help me find some of what had fallen away in Ffynnon Du, but I was sure as hell going to use everything I had to keep us all secure. To keep us all together.

“You are entirely and breathtakingly remarkable.”  
I sparked even more brightly at Hannibal’s quiet praise, helplessly, deliciously burning. For him. For us.  
“To be whole again, Will. Think of it. To be as we are all meant to be. You, and me, and Gally.”  
I thought about it. Nodded. 

On the edge of the fading illumination, the shifting, ebony abyss that was my daughter billowed and writhed.  
“Well,” I said slowly, rubbing my eyes behind my glasses, beckoning for Gally to come and re-join us, “if we’re all going out on a midnight family excursion,” I patted the parcel of leftover meat in my pocket, “then we need a dog-sitter for old man Winston.”  
Gally had pirouetted into me, yawning. “And that new puppy, Daddy. We have to care for it, even if we aren't much interested in it, that's right, isn't it, Hans?”  
Hannibal nodded at her. “I shall speak to the chatelaine about providing a canine chaperone.”  
“And we’d better take a picnic.”  
“Without question,” he agreed, one hand grasping Gally’s as she skipped to his side, the other finding and claiming my waist. “There is a special dish that I have been waiting to introduce to you both. Something definitely _not_ vegetarian.”

I crooked a speculative eyebrow. Gally beamed, and I guessed that the surprise had been cooked up between them.  
“Will,” Hannibal whispered in my ear. “Have you wondered at all what became of Great Aunt Delyn?”


End file.
